The Future of Privacy and How to Stop it

Transcript

All right, thanks everybody. Thanks for coming. Uh, yes, my name is Kurt Opsol. Uh, and I am glad to be here to talk about privacy. Uh, I've been an internet law lawyer for, yeah, nearly 30 years. I was the former general counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is an organization dedicated defending civil liberties, privacy, free expression, such online. Uh I worked on similar issues for a while at the Filecoin Foundation. Uh now I volunteer with the Financial Privacy Foundation and I'm here on behalf of the Financial Privacy Foundation. I also do uh a legal defense fund for security security researchers volunteer with EFF and then I still have a day job working at a

boutique law firm Rittercasta and Jstone. So let's start by talking about what is at stake. Privacy is a fundamental human right and more importantly it makes other rights possible. It is necessary so we can have some personal autonomy and it's necessary for freedom of expression so you can understand learn about ideas express those ideas without someone looking over your shoulder and where law and policy are not sufficient we need technology as a backs stop to protect our privacy. We need all three but in order to build the future we would want to live in we need to have privacy and protect it as best we can.

And what does privacy protect? Well, I look at privacy in a number of different ways and I think is worth exploring autonomy. This is the right to be left alone. That what you do is nobody else's business. It doesn't mean you have to have anything to hide. It just people shouldn't be up in your business. It's also about control where you can decide what you are want to disclose, who can have access to your information, where there is choice and you need to have your consent for making that information public. So it's not being in the woods with no internet. You can have privacy that way, but we need to be able to interact with society and be able to make the choices to keep our privacy while still being able to interact.

Privacy is also a defense against a dystopian future. Things that might be lawful would be part of the norms today that would be no problem to disclose. Maybe later they'll become unacceptable as things change as governments change as society changes. And by having privacy today, you can protect yourself against that dystopian future. And as I said, it's also the keystone for all of our fundamental rights. It protects the ability to have and share our political and social ideas and be able to gather information, learn about controversial topics where you might not know want people to know that you're looking at them so you can understand them. And also very importantly to associate with others to get into your communities and

groups. Well, what are the threats? Privacy is under threat. We live in the golden age of surveillance. We have basically ubiquitous surveillance attempts all around us. The phone is a tracking device that you carry around in your pocket. When you go online without having uh protections, if you're not using encryption, if you're not using privacy encrypting tools, a lot of what you're doing is being tracked, is being seen, is being gathered. Uh and this creates basically a de facto privacy loss. De facto. used to be that when you did things, maybe some people would observe them, maybe it was possible for them to write it down and

and make a record of what you did, but it was a lot of work. It was a lot of recordeping. It was difficult to do. So, you could walk down the street, lots of people would see you, and you would still have your privacy. But this is increasingly being lost as computers are able to gather that data, hold on to it, correlate it, and it's very, very easy to collect that and store it. And now the analysis of that data is being turbocharged by the availability of artificial intelligence to look through and make connections that even would be have been difficult to uh understand just a few years ago.

The surveillance is both commercial and government. And we have a a whole industry of data brokers which combine the two which gather information through commercial means, buying it, trading it, uh, and then selling them to governments who often can purchase that data without having to go through the legal process that their country's laws would require them if they were going to get it directly. And so in order to get autonomy, which we want to have, this requires effective tools to protect our privacy while at the same time being able to take advantage of interconnected systems.

Now, why are these things so much under threat? Well, there's a number of forces that are are are pushing against it. A lot of that is the desire to detect and prevent crime. And this is often the basis for the threat, which is not to say detecting and preventing crime is something we don't want to see. We don't want to have a lot of crime. But there's a lot of overcriminalization. There are expanded surveillance and investigative authorities to to deal with these threats and to use these threats as a way to uh be able to gather more information and say, well, okay, maybe some of this information will be about innocent people, but trust us, we will use our discretion. We will look at the information and decide whether it is worthy. But that gives a lot of power for those decisions to be made in ways

that you might not like where it is something that a particular officer, a particular government says, well, we want we're interested in this person. We'll look at all the things that they've done and see if there is something that we can use to cause cause them trouble. And there's also descriptions from the regulators who are uh looking at it and making a choice and saying, well, there's no specific rules. We know whether there's a problem when we see it. So we need to look at everything. So in a list here of some of the key threats to to privacy. There are many.

This is not a complete list. Uh one of the oldest is pushing for back doors to end encryption. That was the first crypto as in cryptography wars starting in the '9s where there were attempts to use export controls and sanctions to to prevent the spread of strong encryption that ultimately failed. uh the doctrine of code to speech was very helpful uh and to to allow strong encryption to be available around the world and there was a pretty much a failed attempt to uh by the United States to have strong encryption domestically and weak encryption available for export because it became very easy for people to get the strong encryption and then ultimately we have strong encryption

available around but that has led to pushes to put back doors into that encryption backdoors sort of got policy bad name. So they tried to rename them asking for the same things like a secure golden key. The the new uh trend is for client side scanning where they say well we're not really breaking the encryption because we're just looking at the endpoint and getting the clear text which is essentially the same thing. Uh tracking technologies have been ramped up a lot. There's a lot of online tracking, cookies, uh, IP address tracking, looking at browser fingerprints, and then there's real life tracking, uh, automated license plate reasoners, facial recognitions on camera networks throughout the world have become more and more popular. Uh, within

uh, within the United States, there is a interesting trend on this though. Flock safety a company that provides automated license plate readers and uh sc you know AI empowered scanning networks has become very very unpopular uh which you know in about 30 years of working on privacy issues it has been one of the most reviled privacy defeating technologies I've ever seen. We have mass data collection in addition to the dangers of the mass data collection directly by you know searches through that that leads to mass data breaches when someone is able to defeat the security and get all the information in there. There's a lot of overcolction of information, personally identifiable information. Uh and a new uh trend has

been towards using age verification, requiring age verification. So to see if somebody is under 18 or you know underage for seeing certain materials. But the way that it works, they have to check everybody to find out whether or not they are a child. And it leads to mass collection of age information which could be done, you know, with a yes no uh through a ZK proof. But instead most of these are giving full information about ID in order to do this. Uh expanded authorities in law enforcement. There is a new cyber crime treaty that is uh uh has been proposed and countries are signing on to it though slowly uh that will allow more crossber access to that information allowing it to spread more f uh more quickly and further.

So how do we protect against this? Well, one of the most important ways to protect against this is tools. Having tools that allow people who are not sophisticated, who do not have the elite technical skills to be able to use uh uh sophisticated technologies that require command line interfaces and a deep understanding of networking infrastructure, but rather a tool that they can just use. uh we good examples with that with signal with tour uh and and or even for the signal protocol WhatsApp is an interesting example because it uses the same protocol and it is used by billions of people and most of them didn't even know that it has the signal protocol but easily accessible

tools allow us to protect our right it democratizes access to privacy and that helps enable civil society and it's especially important for marginalized groups so and by tools it's Not just apps or software, it's a whole stack. Software, protocols, infrastructure. We need all of these things in place to allow ourselves to maximize our privacy protections. But these tools are under threat. For a long time, governments all over the world have been trying to weaken these technologies.

Uh they may introduce requirements. We talked about just now about back doors and client side access. uh and a lot of this has come into resistance saying well we've designed our system so that's not possible we don't have the keys so that the users have the key we can't get access to it and a lot of reaction from some policy makers are well we don't really understand the technology so we're just going to order you to make it happen uh we call this sometimes asking people to nerd harder to just you figure it out because we don't know how and we're just going to make you do it that creates a lot of tensions when you literally cannot do it and as in the required personally identify information to connections to be online that this makes anonymity extremely difficult.

This makes it so that even if you have a lot of strong protections to uh uh nevertheless you get to a site and then you have to give PII directly to that site to continue onward which can cut through the protections that you've put for your networks and often when they have these technical assistance orders asking the companies to help them get access to information they come with non-disclosure provisions so the companies can't even say what is going on or make a an easy way to protest or challenge challenge these uh technical assistance orders.

And the more disturbing trend more recently is there have been some targets where the uh projects or developers of those projects have been targeted under criminal laws or sanctions. going after the people who write the code and provide the services that can make privacy possible and not just using to to find out who are who are using the tools for evil but looking at the people who are making the tools possible. Some of the most prominent examples there is to cache where the software itself was placed under under sanction that was ultimately challenged and the sanction removed. In fact, out of that came the notion that a immutable contract that was already on a a blockchain system was

not the type of thing that the sanction law could cover. So, it wasn't appropriate to put the software itself on the sanction. That was a good result and the sanctions were dropped on tornado cache as a software, but the criminal cases against the developers Roman Storm and Alex in Netherlands continue onward. Uh and also uh this summer there was an example of a encrypted uh email uh provider a service provider out of Italy uh that was providing services to activist groups. uh the US alleged that some of those uh groups that were being supported or having using the tools, using the email, using the blogging service were terrorist groups. And so

they named the organization that provided these tools as a specially designated terrorist. And that led to them losing all of their uh their domain name, their bank accounts. They were debanked. they were uh essentially shut down by lack of of being able to do services that were not covered by these sanctions within two weeks. And this even if you put aside you say you know those are isolated examples. The danger is that this can be expanded to other or other tools that are can be used to protect privacy and oftentimes people who have mal intent will be early adopters of privacy technologies. Uh and

we need to have uh the privacy technologies to work. But if the people who are volunteering their time have to consider risks, even if it's a small risk of being getting in trouble for doing so, it is harder to build the community and has a chilling effect on the developers. So what can we do about that? Should we just give up? Well, it reminded me back of in 1999 where Scott McNeely, who was the CEO of Sun Microsystems, said, "You have no privacy. Get over it." Well, we didn't get over it. We should never be over it. Privacy nihilism is not the answer. Instead, I would like to get inspiration from Dylan Thomas. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage

against the dying of the light. So, how do we go ahead and try to build this better future for privacy? I think it is a tripod. I the three ways that must work together. We have to have the technology to build resilient technical means for people to quickly and easily use privacy and anomaly enhancing technologies to protect themselves. We also need policy. We need public support for privacy as a fundamental right. Uh and so part of this is for you to go to your communities and spread the word that privacy is important and we have to have the means to protect it. And we need the law. We need to have laws and treaties that respect these fundamental

rights without overbalancing the scale towards law enforcement by making one that balances our civil liberties and our rights to privacy. And we need all three because if someone violates the law, we need a technology that will continue to protect us. We need a policy that will mean that if the public sees that they're violating the law, it will be uh politically uh uncomfortable for them to have violated the law. All three have to work together. So let's unpack this a little bit. A key part of building resilient privacy tools. One, build for usability and utility. This is necessary for mass adoption. Mass adoption is extremely important. The

more that technologies are used, the more difficult it is to remove them. If people use them, like them every day, and no longer have access with them, people will be upset when a tool is taken away. If it is easy to use, people will choose to use it. If it is very hard to use, they may choose a less privacy protective uh alternative and it is much better and stronger and more resilient with mass adoption. And that comes from usability and utility. Open- source and decentralization. If you put software out there in multiple repositories, even if one goes down, that software is still available. Even if if you're uh not able to uh connect with it anymore, it's still available

for others to download, compile and use and make available and take advantage of. And decentralization with multiple sources uh multiple nodes. This helps it be much more resilient to keep on going even if it becomes problematic in one jurisdiction or another. And third, get good narratives and use cases. build public support for law and policy by showing how these things can be useful, can help protect priv privacy, show the harms that are being protected from and show how beneficial it is to the user that people will agree with and say this is a good thing and we need to have it.

So when you're building it, fight for the users. Users need to use a system securely and understand how to protect themselves. So it makes easy choices where you have privacy by default that you have uh uh lites able to uh send and receive payments. For example, if you have a wallet, if you have if you're buying books, if you're supporting NOS's, these are very important parts of your fundamental rights. And that is a reason why we need to have it within the financial ecosystem, within the cryptocurrency ecosystem. and work with the marginalized groups to ensure all the users can benefit from that technology. They are often ones who most need alternatives.

Build the tools well. So if you have your values, if you believe in having privacy and believe having freedom of expression, build those values into your clothes. Will this tool be able to protect and preserve civil liberties? And don't recentralize decentralized systems. The promise of decentralization is putting as much control as possible into the hands of the users. Now, in order to make things run, sometimes it is very tempting to make things more centralized so you have more control, be able to move it forward more smoothly, less cat hurting perhaps, but centralization creates single points of failures. And if you're trying to make something resilient, any single point of failure becomes a a weakness that can be

exploited. Keep it secret, keep it safe. Privacy and security must be by design as early as possible in the development because it is much harder to add on later. It will end up reducing trouble and therefore reducing costs later if you build it in. Sometimes it can be hard because people are trying to get the minimum viable product, trying to get to the market as quickly as they can and say, "Well, we can deal with privacy and security later." But I urge you to build it when you're building early as possible, make it strong and resilient, and promote it as something that is strong and resilient to help you get to the market that you want to get to. And

note that cryptocurrencies have a built-in bug bounty. that security is extremely important and that even if you haven't had a security issue yet, it may come. If you become successful with anything, people will look for it as a possible target. And unfortunately, we have seen far too many major security fails. Most recently, Binance, $6 billion, three of which may have gotten recovered, but still one of the biggest security fails of all time so far. So, let's make it. So that was the biggest and try to make sure our systems are resilient and strong against attackers.

And then another important thing for everybody to do is spread the word and try to get mass support from this community from the communities you know offline uh and your uh the extremely online should care a lot because there's so much tracking going on now but local communities also need to have privacy. uh the organizi organizing that people did against the flock cameras was very effective. It was done at the local levels. It was about individual cities and towns where the citizens talked to their city councils and said we don't want this in our community and it was getting those surveillance systems removed. And again, marginalized groups, civil society, human rights defenders, they face higher threats. Uh and so try

to create a system that will work for them. And if you're part of those communities, spread the word on how they can protect themselves. But ultimately, privacy matters to everybody. And I want to say like there's some tropes out there that say, well, sometimes, you know, talking to people about privacy, I get push back. Um, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. That's a common trope. But everybody has something they don't want to share. Whether it's something they need to hide or something they just don't want to share, they have that. And even if someone says no really I have absolutely nothing out I want to live completely o in the open. Help them understand that privacy also helps others that you rely on. Journalists need privacy so they can communicate

with sources and you benefit from the news coverage that that comes from that. Dissent against authoritarian regimes helps the society even if you're not part of that descent. uh and new cultural and social stances sometimes need privacy and autonomy and anonymity in order to develop and it can be helpful for societies to evolve in new directions. Another one is that we need to give up privacy so that we can be protected from various threats. Security versus privacy is a false dichotomy.

Security needs privacy to be effective and privacy needs security to be effective. It is not a zero sum game. The trade of approach blinds policymakers to solutions that give us both privacy and security. And a surveillance society is all too often designed to protect an inroup that receives uh where you know the law protects but does not bind while leaving out an out group which the law binds but does not protect. Another common trope is that my information is boring. Why would anyone care? Well, mass surveillance doesn't have to care. It is being done by automation, by gathering the

information, by looking through it to find connections of something that they may not have a person care about, but they may be looking for connections. And sometimes they may even find connections that don't really exist. The analysis of your information online, your PII, can lead to a mistake or misjudgment that will affect your life. Even if it is just an error that could be cleared up. It start out where a mistake has been made and then you have to deal with correcting it. Or it may be that they make some correct judgments, but that could still be used against you. And it might be were something that was lawful but unfavored that maybe been later became unlawful or maybe just became something that someone could target you for embarrassment.

So use your power. Use your power as a constituent. Contact your representatives. Legislators need to know that their constituents care about privacy. They hear from law enforcement. They hear from the surveillance capitalists all the time. And so you need to provide a counterbalance and effort counts. The more effort you make in contacting a legislature will mean that they will wait that more. So if you contact directly, if you have a call, set up a meeting, that counts very powerfully. If you send uh written communications, that will count for some, but they they understand that it's a lot easier to uh mass send written communications. If you sign onto a petition, that can be

helpful, but that's not going to be as powerful. So the more effort you put into uh getting your also uh if you're talking to a legislature with a smaller group then uh you know for a local politician each constituent counts for more. So get the word out where you can and work locally. So putting all these together if we work on our technology and build it resilient if we work on the policy by talking to our communities getting more support and getting people to be politically active about it. If we try to work together to get the laws that we need together, we can help chart this course for a future where technology will enhance our lives and preserve the rights that we hold dear. But remember, we have to make that future. Long as the struggle hard to

fight, but together we can do this. So, thank you. And I have a few t few minutes for questions. Thank you very much, Court. So I believe you already answered most of the questions and uh this is very interesting one. So you already told us what to do. Could you please give us one successful example of how people fight for the privacy laws and uh your choice uh of any privacy tools with a good UX let's say.

>> All right. So uh examples uh well an a set of examples that I would like to highlight uh is the local community efforts. Uh one one uh thing that I worked on back at the electronic frontier foundation has continued on uh since then is community control. Uh and this was efforts to go to local city councils uh and convince them to pass laws not to stop surveillance necessarily, but to say that the police had to go to them and get permission for adding any additional surveillance tools, have public sessions discussing it. And those were were successful in having starting the conversations. And when the conversation start that meant

information about the surveillance was going to the community and community members could go to the city council meetings and have their voices be heard and that led to a lot of surveillance systems being denied to the police who were asking them where previously they were just going and ordering these technologies and installing them. So I think uh start local and move moving on up. And examples of usable privacy tools uh well I say use signal use tour that's a common refrain uh but I think another couple excellent examples of extremely usable privacy many people uh throughout this country and throughout the world use WhatsApp which has the signal protocol uh it got encryption just cuz

WhatsApp turned it on one day uh and then two billion people were having encrypted communications and didn't have to do anything. Now I would say you know I I prefer signal I don't have a strong trust in meta but if meta is not a part of your uh threat model that is a a great example of of doing it and another good example just switching to a different layer the protocol layer is just changing some of the the protocols like it used to be that most web traffic was clear text and now most uh web traffic is encrypted and that was just moving people to protocols and an effort to make it a lot easier to get certificates through uh through Let's Encrypt.

>> Okay. And we have time for one more question. Okay. That's uh that's the popular one. How can a regular person contribute to uh slowing down surveillance dystopia that we're heading into? >> Well, okay. So, I said, you know, it's part of this, right, Bud? Well, what is the best thing for a regular person to do? I think talk to your communities about the importance. Get local groups that care about it. that are in communities, whether they're online communities or local in-person communities, and try to build the support. And that might be having people uh join in encrypted chat groups to be able to talk talk about things, passing information about what is going on uh so

that people more informed people can be more effectively uh activist. And once you have these communities of support, uh you can then use them when there are opportunities to push back. And then the other thing you can do personally is use privacy-enhancing tools. There are out there uh web 3 privacy uh the organization has uh if you go to their website they have a lots of lists of privacy enhancing tools that people are using from different browsers protocols. You can look at VPNs and take a look at that and find the ones that that can help you be more private online.